RALEIGH – One of the recommendations in the John Locke Foundation’s alternative budget for the state of North Carolina (click here) is a significant increase in the average tuition and fees charged to students at the University of North Carolina.
We make several arguments for this. One is that those who benefit from non-entitlement government programs should, as much as possible, pay for them. It’s called personal responsibility. Another is that so much of the state funding to the UNC system funds not classroom instruction but instead research and anxillary activities of only a marginal benefit, at best, to taxpayers.
Still another is that, since families of UNC students have much higher average incomes than those of the general population – and, presumbly, UNC graduates earn more income than non-UNC graduates – North Carolina’s policy of taxing its citizens to keep tuition to no more than a quarter of the cost of a UNC education is actually a scheme to redistribute income from the poor to the rich.
I will grant you that the idea of significant tuition increases can be a hard sell. But public opinion about these issues is more complicated than some would like you to believe. An informative article in the latest issue of Public Perspective, the magazine of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut, analyzes the survey data on higher education subsidies.
If you simply ask poll respondents whether they favor taxpayer support for college educations, they will say yes – overwhelmingly. As the authors point out, however, “Americans remain philosophically conservative, and ill at ease about the extent and costs of expanded government involvement in higher education.” For example, a 1997 poll asked respondents to weigh competing demands on government budgets. Only 20 percent picked “ensuring that every American can afford to send their children to college” as a “very high” or “high” priority, while more than 70 percent ranked environmental conservation, health care, and Social Security as a high or very high priority.
Furthermore, when asked what kind of government aid should be provided to college students, most poll respondents do not endorse the kind of open-ended state subsidies offered in the UNC system. The strongest support in a 1999 poll was for work-study programs, tax breaks, and student loans. Fewer than half of the sample supported government grants.